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Comedy Titan Pat Proft Joins
The Great American Pitchfest &
Screenwriting Conference Great American Pitchfest Executive Director (and lifelong Proftian) Bob Schultz talked to Pat Proft about writing comedy in the past, present, and future, and managed to suppress his impulse to squeal like a girl at her first Beatles concert. Pat will be talking comedy and taking your questions at the Great American Pitchfest & Screenwriting Conference on June 13, 2009. This class is completely free to anybody who wishes to attend. RSVP to info@pitchfest.com to attend this free session. --------------------- Bob Schultz: I have, of course, been a fan for a long time. I'm really honored to talk to you. Pat Proft: That's so nice to hear! Thank you! BS: Yeah. I didn't even realize how long a time I'd been a fan, until I learned that you were a writer on the Star Wars Holiday Special. PP: Yes! I get interviewed for that every year and I say the same thing every year. It sucks. It's terrible. It sucks. It's probably the most dreadful television ever, don't you think? BS: Yeah. But it's also really funny. PP: (Laughs.) I love the music! I play it all the time. They gave it to the wrong people to do. It was an amazingly dumb thing. You know what's amazing? How Lucas could do something like that. Give something like that into somebody's hands like that... It's really weird I think. BS: Well, now, years later, having seen the prequel trilogy, maybe he knew he could make it just as dreadful as anyone else. PP: (Laughs.) BS: I have of course, been a fan for a long time. Police Academy, Frank Drebin, Real Genius... PP: I'm glad you mentioned Real Genius. That's one of my favorite things. I like that one a lot. Thank you! BS: Thank YOU for agreeing to come to the Great American Pitchfest! PP: Sure. The free classes sound great for writers. BS: We try to have classes that address all stages of the process, from getting your first idea on paper to hiring and firing an agent... PP: That's a good one. BS: ... to polishing your Oscar acceptance speech and everything in between. PP: Speaking of that, how many times is Kate Winslet going to be surprised? She's always so fucking surprised. I don't get it. She's already won two out of two [awards]. You'd think once you get two out of two, maybe she wouldn't be so surprised anymore. Would you? BS: Maybe she was just surprised that there were no more clothes for her to take off in the movie. PP: A movie starring her and Marissa Tomei! That's the movie I want to see. BS: (Laughs.) So anyway, the classes are free to anyone who wants to attend, but the pitching on Sunday has a fee attached. PP: How many people attend? BS: The free day, when you will be speaking, we can get 1000 or more. The pitchfest, we cap ticket sales at 500 to make sure everybody gets all the pitches they want. PP: Great! I'm glad you guys have that many people turn out! BS: Yeah! So we are friends with the Austin Film Festival, where we met Bill True, who put us in contact with you via another friend. That's the sordid tale of Six Degrees of Separation that brought Bob Schultz to Pat Proft. PP: You know, Anthony Perkins was seven degrees from Eva Braun. BS: Really! PP: Yeah. BS: So did you know Tony Perkins? PP: Yeah. He directed something I wrote. BS: So that means you are EIGHT degrees from Eva Braun. PP: That's right!! Oh my God that's right! My nipples are hard right now! BS: Mine too! Okay. So let's talk about your writing. Did you choose comedy or did comedy choose you? PP: It's all I've ever wanted to do for as long as I can remember remembering anything. I treated grade school, high school, as my sitcom that day. I would just go to school and mess around. It's just... from the first moments I saw Laurel & Hardy. That's it. It's all I've ever wanted. BS: Laurel & Hardy. I don't care how many times I see that piano roll down those stairs, it's still funny. PP: The wrong hats bit always makes me laugh. They keep putting the wrong hats on. Simple gag. And it always makes me laugh. The more pain in those movies, the funnier they were. Now I've got my grandkids into it.
PP: It was! But at least it spawned the other thing. BS: ... whenever Frank Drebin had a chance to shoot someone or throw somebody off of something, he always took that shot. Did Laurel & Hardy lead you to that? PP: Yeah. I love slapstick. I love Hal Roach stuff. The bigger the stunt, the better I like it. You know my favorite thing in Naked Gun, actually? The airbag in the car. It puts the car in gear and the car takes off and Drebin is shooting at his own car. I love that. And then the big explosion at the end, followed by his face saying, “Was that.... MY car?” BS: That face – that whole scene – is an example of how you can find humor in seriousness. If Drebin didn't take everything completely seriously, it would turn into just mugging. PP: Exactly. That's what Scary Movie
3 was about. BS: He was great in that movie. PP: He was very dramatic. I loved him in that. BS: Can you talk a little bit about being funny on the page versus funny on the screen? Like take Drebin singing the national anthem in Naked Gun. That's funny on the page. But it's downright hilarious on the screen. PP: I come from a background of performing, so it's much easier to know what's going to get the big laughs. When we were writing Naked Gun, we laughed at everything we put on the page. When we came up with the “Nice beaver” line, we laughed for maybe a week. That was our joke of the week. But we also knew how Leslie was a lousy singer, so we knew it would be a great moment. BS: It's become so influential. Baseball games have never been the same. PP: It was pretty cool. BS: You'd be honored to know that when Ricardo Montelban died, there was an obit online that read, “Ricardo Montelban died today after falling out of a stadium and being run over by a steamroller and a marching band.” PP: (Laughs.) For a while they would play the scoreboard stuff at Dodger games. It was wild. The guy sliding into second base and getting mauled by a tiger. But the OJ Simpson going down the stairs in a wheelchair... I was rooting for that to happen to Dick Cheney [in his wheelchair]. That would have been wonderful. BS: (Laughs.) The layers of comedy that have been built on OJ Simpson in the last few years is wild enough without that. PP: Maybe we should get him to do a DVD commentary from prison. BS: What else does he have to do? Let's talk about writing a role for an actor. Obviously, you had Leslie Nielson in mind for Naked Gun, because of the Police Squad! Show, but take Real Genius. Did you know Val Kilmer before that? It's become such an indelible role for him. PP: You know, that was a nice surprise. We always wanted Hanks [who we had worked with on Bachelor Party], but he wasn't available right away. So we started with a whole new cast. BS: Hanks didn't turn out to be much, so you got lucky. PP: (Laughs) No. Brian Grazer actually called me and said “if you were doing a comedy now, what would you do?” And I said “We're going to go after Hanks.” The bastard took him from us and put him in Splash. So we didn't have him. BS: Next time, you need to say “We're going to use Dane Cook” or someone. Someone who can't open a movie. PP: Dane Cook. There's a guy. Or Carlos Mencia. There's another guy who's hilarious. BS: (Laughs). Next time Grazer calls, give him Mencia. PP: That's good. I should have said me! Shit! I could have been in Splash! BS: And you'd have been great in Philadelphia, too. PP: The other guy we wanted for Real Genius was Michael Keaton. We loved his work in Night Shift. He was so great in that. He has that face that makes you think he's thinking 100 steps ahead of you. Like a real genius. BS: You have written so many legendary comedy characters, like I feel that Naked Gun will be the first line in Leslie Nielsen's obituary... PP: And if we're lucky, they'll show clips. Then we'll make some money! BS: ... but when it came to Police
Academy, it was more of an ensemble. You still had the
“smartest guy in the room” in Mahoney, but um... did you
know you were going to have Michael Winslow [aka, the sound
effects guy]? PP: No. The director found him at a comedy club, and brought him in. He's the only character we didn't write. But, if it's funny it stays. He worked really well in the ensemble, but – obviously – he totally stood out as well. BS: A lot of our readers will be familiar with your film career, but do you mind talking a little bit about working on television with the Smothers Brothers? What are the differences between writing to a performer as opposed to writing to a story? PP: It was after their controversial heyday, maybe six years later. Tommy said he just wanted to be funny. Just wanted to steer clear of the political stuff. I was writing with Chevy Chase on that show. So we wrote pure comedy stuff. But eventually Tommy started changing stuff and courting controversy and going after political figures. It was a show that wobbled along. It started off being one thing then changed to another as folks from their first show started coming in. BS: Sometimes a performer's voice starts to overtake the writer's words. PP: It was great fun. I like Tommy a lot. He came and found me at the Kentucky Fried Theater and asked if I wanted to write. Teamed me with Chevy which worked out great for both of us. We would write stuff, and then the guys would take it and "Tommy and Dick it up" a little bit more. It was my first big television show, and it was great to work with Tommy and Dick and Pat Paulsen and all those guys. Let me tell you about Chevy. He was brilliant. A lot of the stuff he did on Saturday Night Live, like the “fall of the week” was stuff he couldn't get on the air at the Smothers Brothers. It was “fall of the day” then, and he'd come into the Writers Room and do a great fall. He kept a lot of his stuff in the drawer, then finally he had a chance to use it over on SNL. That stuff made him a comedy superstar. BS: Little did you know, you were present for the creation of a signature bit. That's a good lesson for writers just starting out. No material is wasted. Keep everything. PP: Don Novello [Father Guido Sarducci] was on that show too. BS: I was going to mention him next... Bob Einstein too. PP: Yeah, Bob and I are negotiating now to do another series of Super Daves. BS: That's GREAT! Were you involved in the earlier series of Super Dave? PP: Super Dave came out of something I did in Kentucky Fried Movie. Do you remember that movie? BS: Absolutely. PP: The guy who walks into the group of African-Americans, and yells the N word and runs away. That was me. And from that Bob kind of took it and put a twist on it. BS: You worked with Steve Martin too. PP: I wrote one special for him. We were great pals. He'd come down to the Comedy Store and we'd work. The only award I ever got was a Writers' Guild Award for a Steve Martin special. The All Commercials special. BS: You worked with so many of the greats: Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Redd Foxx, Bob Hope... PP: Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to do a Bob Hope Christmas Special. Bob Hope didn't really rehearse or anything, and I'd written a sketch that didn't have a final punchline. He said, “Ahh, we're gonna film it anyway.” He told me that when I had the ending joke, just put it on the cards and he'd read it. So they're literally filming the sketch and I have the cue card guy in front of me, holding his marker poised over the card, ready for me to come up with the last line. BS: Wow. PP: I know! So there's like three minutes left and I come up with the last line. He puts it down, runs out there, and sure as shit, Hope nailed it. It was just me and him talking one day... talking about the Road movies, and since I'm from Minnesota, we talked about the Vikings and Hubert Humphrey. That was one of my favorite moments in show business. BS: Do you prefer that kind of “on the fly” comedy, or do you prefer to really work out a joke meticulously? PP: When I performed I used to do a lot of improv, so I'm comfortable going on the fly. If pressure is there, I can come up with something useable. BS: Can you talk about your process some? Do you work from a strict structure or outline? Or do you sort of let it all fly in a first draft and then shape it? PP: I get an idea... I always work on a lot of things at once because I don't like getting stuck. I don't believe in sitting there for weeks not coming up with anything so I can shift to something else if I need to. Sometimes something as simple as a title that I think is pretty funny is enough to try to make a movie out of it. Or a character or a situation. If it's a character, I'll come up with funny situations for he or she to be in. Or for something like Naked Gun or Hot Shots!, we had a process. Since we're doing parodies, we would watch the source material and come up with all the signature scenes, then make jokes and stringing a story together from the signature bits. BS: But even within satirizing different genres, you guys had some unique bits as well. Take for instance, the extremely tall guy with food on the side of his face, and when he wipes it off, it's half a banana. PP: Isn't that great? It's a Zucker brothers joke, but Leslie's take totally sold that one. I think that's one of the best jokes. The one that I like is from Scary Movie 3, when somebody kills Charlie Sheen's wife with a car supposedly, and he's surrounded by cops and Charlie comes by and the guy says “Sorry I killed your wife, and by the way, I need a ride home.” BS: (Laughs.)
BS: I agree with you completely. I read in an article once that she and her friends all insist she's not funny in real life. PP: That's okay! She knows how to play it. BS: Hey, the same was reportedly true of Lucille Ball, so Anna is in great company. PP: I met Lucy once! I love that voice. By the time I met her she had that great cigarette voice [Imitates Lucille Ball] Hey! Pat! How's it goin'! BS: Any advice for aspiring comedy writers just starting out? PP: Write it. And perform it [or get someone to perform it]. I was a performer so I got to do my stuff. Now, there aren't really as many little clubs, but there's YouTube and other areas to be seen! Make it and slap it up there! Let people know where to find you. BS: I agree it's important to see comedy performed. Comedy is so much about timing, it's challenging to put it on the page in the best timing without seeing and hearing it. PP: I got started right out of high school. I started instantly, got into a review group here in Minneapolis who is still really good. BS: Want to give them a plug? PP: Dudley Riggs' Brave New Workshop. There's a website if you want to check it out. It's a great place to get involved in comedy. Because it's a review house. There's a cast of four or five or six and you do your own material. Then we started doing improvs in the late sixties. BS: When you hear about comics or writers coming up, you hear Second City, you hear Groundlings, but what we don't hear about are these smaller groups who maybe do just as good work, just as effective, but they didn't produce a Tina Fey, so don't get the press. PP: Our workshop is actually older than Second City. It's been around for a long time, but we never left this place. That always irritated us, because the stuff coming out of Dudley Riggs is great, and a lot of us have gone on to do better things. BS: There are probably similar opportunities in communities all over the world. PP: Yeah. I had the experience there, and when I got out to LA, cable had really started ripping and they needed stuff, so there was a comedy resurgence. Then the youth movies in the late seventies. I got out there at the perfect time and got seen by the right people. If I had been seen by Mother Teresa instead of Tommy Smothers, I wonder if I would be in India right now. BS: She was HILARIOUS. PP: (Laughs.) BS: So now there's a new wave of American comedy right beside you. You have the Scary Movie franchise and new Super Daves on the way. But there's Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, and so on. Care to comment on those who are following in your footsteps defining a generation of comedy? PP: I think it's great. I think a lot of great stuff is being done. I think a lot of it hearkens back to our Bachelor Party days. I'm very pleased by the state of comedy today. BS: And I am very pleased that you have agreed to join us and speak to aspiring writer at the Great American Pitchfest. Any last words? PP: Always have a product in hand. Write your scripts! And make sure you own it. Get all the legal stuff handled and buttoned down. Then go for it. BS: One last question: Have you ever really had a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you? PP: No! But that's a great line. I love that line. BS: I'm telling you, Real Genius is
packed with greatness. PP: I loved the ice nickels! That's actually something somebody did. We hung out at Cal Tech for a while. A lot of the stuff in the movies we actually saw there. The guy who lived in the tunnels was actually a guy we met at Cal Tech. BS: Did he really enter all the sweepstakes, or was that your bit? PP: That was ours, but in addition to living in the tunnels, he dressed like Peter Pan. The guy was extremely fried. Out of his head. BS: Geniuses usually are. You are welcome to dress like Peter Pan at the GAPF in June if you want. PP: (Laughs.) BS: Pat, thank you so much for your time. PP: Thank you! |
BS:
I'd be curious to hear how you've let that idea of “more
pain means more comedy” influence your work. It's clearly
present in Naked Gun, and Police Squad, which was a
criminally underappreciated television show, by the way...
Keep it as serious as you can in this kind of movie. Charlie
Sheen asked me about that on Hot Shots! He asked “How do I
do this? I've never done this kind of movie before.” I told
him, “Go for an Oscar.”
PP:
I love that line. The balls on that guy. You mentioned it
before, but Charlie, Leslie and Anna Faris are the three
people who do this straight ahead parody "playing comedy
straight" thing so well. I think Anna is wonderful.